Coinbase Ventures purchased ENA tokens on the open market and announced a partnership with Ethena to build on-chain savings products for over 100 million subscribed users.
Cryptopolitan has I mentioned previously On Coinbase’s growing presence in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, the exchange took on the role of official publisher of the USDC treasury and acquired USDH brand assets from Native Markets in May.
The deal with Ethena is Coinbase’s latest move to expand its presence across decentralized finance protocols and, this time, an artificial dollar infrastructure.
What does the partnership include?
Coinbase projects Written on X “Ethena is an important player in the onchain finance space,” he said, adding that they look forward to a closer partnership between Ethena and both Coinbase and USDC.
The collaboration targets onchain financing and savings products targeting a combined user base of over 100 million, with Athena stated The first growth initiative of the partnership will be launched next week. However, neither party specified what the product was.
The two parties to the deal also did not disclose the size of the ENA purchase or the financial terms of the partnership.
Athena’s position in DeFi
Ethena runs the synthetic dollar protocol on Ethereum. The project has about $5.4 billion in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data, placing it among the largest DeFi protocols by this measure.
The protocol has generated approximately $983 million in cumulative fees since its launch.
Sometime on June 2, ENA was trading at About $0.097a jump of more than 10% from the previous 24 hours. The token is currently trading at $0.091 and has a market capitalization of over $825 million, with 9 billion of the total supply of 15 billion in circulation.
Ethena has gone through multiple funding rounds, raising a total of… $166 million from various backersincluding Franklin Templeton, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Binance Labs, according to DeFiLlama records.
Coinbase expansion pattern
Coinbase followed similar partnerships this year as it became the sole publisher of a USDC treasury on Hyperliquid after Circle’s stablecoin was designated an Aligned Quote Asset on the trading platform.
This arrangement with Hyperliquid gave Coinbase a key role in a network that processes over $176 billion in monthly perpetual futures volume.
In March, Coinbase was also launched Stock futures contracts are available 24/7 Providing synthetic exposure to Magnificent 7 technology stocks to international traders.
According to the exchange, these moves are part of its push to make USDC the default settlement layer for onchain capital markets.
Compass Point analysts estimated that the Hyperliquid USDC deal could redirect between $60 million and $80 million in annual EBITDA away from Circle and Coinbase combined, with Hyperliquid taking most of the reserve income from USDC deposits on its platform.
It is not yet known whether the Ethena partnership will follow a similar revenue-sharing structure or take a different form.
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